University of the Pacific Scholarly Commons College of the Pacific aF culty Articles All Faculty Scholarship Spring 1-1-2010 The omT ato Queen of San Joaquin Ken Albala University of the Pacific, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cop-facarticles Part of the Food Security Commons, History Commons, and the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Albala, K. (2010). The omT ato Queen of San Joaquin. Gastronomica, 10(2), 55–63. DOI: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.2.55 https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cop-facarticles/32 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the All Faculty Scholarship at Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of the Pacific aF culty Articles by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. entrepreneurs | ken albala The Tomato Queen of San Joaquin SPRING 2010 SPRING Few people today recognize the name of Tillie Lewis, Above: Tillie Lewis with brokers in her Stockton office, 1945. 55 yet she was one of the most influential figures in the history courtesy of the haggin museum, stockton, california of food production in America. Not only was Flotill, the canning factory she started in Stockton, California, among enthusiastic journalists turned into a classic American tale the first to market u.s.-grown Roma tomatoes to mainstream of rags to riches. Rewriting the story was also a marketing consumers, but Tillie was an exemplary businesswoman who device to help identify Tillie with her products, especially GASTRONOMICA directed her company through labor tensions and racial issues the diet foods that purportedly helped with her own weight and also founded Tasti-Diet Foods, the “first low-calorie problem. Tillie was featured in the magazines Time, Life, food line to be marketed nationally on a retail basis.”1 and National Geographic, scores of newspapers, and on the Tillie’s story relied on a great measure of self-mythol- Merv Griffin Show.2 Over the course of her life she held ogizing. She and Meyer Lewis, her husband and de facto many titles, including “Horatio Alger in Petticoats” and publicity agent, constantly rewrote the narrative, which “Tillie of the Valley.” A 1952 Reader’s Digest story called her gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol.10, no.2, pp.55–63, issn 1529-3262. © 2010 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press’s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2010.10.2.55. This content downloaded from 138.9.41.247 on Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:13:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms the “First Lady of the Larder” and “The Duchess of Diet.” Above: Tillie Lewis in a promotional brochure, “Presenting the Every version of her life story related her determination, House of Flotill,” ca. 1946. courtesy of the haggin museum, stockton, california perseverance, innovation, and ultimate success, reassuring readers that anything is possible in America—even for a dropped out of school at age twelve to work, and married barely five-foot-tall Jewish woman from Brooklyn with at sixteen, but that her obsession with tomatoes was partly 5 flame-red hair. responsible for the marriage breaking up after five years. SPRING 2010 SPRING Tillie was born Myrtle Ehrlich in 1901, the daughter An article in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner claimed 56 of a Brooklyn phonograph salesman; she took the nick- that Tillie had gone to work at age twelve, folding kimonos name “Tillie” before dropping out of high school at the and earning $2.50 a week, two dollars of which she had to age of fifteen. (She later insisted, “No—I was not a drop turn over to her father and stepmother.6 It quoted Tillie as out! Economic conditions made me a ‘force out’ after one saying, “I learned thrift early in life…and since then I’ve year of high school.”3) At sixteen she married a wholesale never bought anything I couldn’t pay for in 10 days.” All of grocery distributor for whom she worked as a clerk. Most these stories emphasized her humble birth and the difficult GASTRONOMICA biographies claimed that Tillie developed a sudden and circumstances of her teenage years. None bothered to men- obsessive fascination with tomatoes. One biographer wrote tion that Tillie had worked on Wall Street selling securities that she was struck by the unique flavor of the pear-shaped and had done well enough in the midst of the Depression pomodoros packed by Italian firms and sold in the grocery to make twelve thousand dollars a year, most of which store where she worked;4 another embellished her story she was able to save.7 She also enrolled in night classes by noting that she had lost her mother soon after birth, at New York University.8 This content downloaded from 138.9.41.247 on Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:13:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Tomatoes were not, in fact, the guiding force in her life. meeting him. It is interesting that the biographers consis- Her involvement with them likely resulted from a shift in u.s. tently omit the Del Gaizo family’s background. Senator trade policy.9 Canned tomatoes were primarily sold to the Luigi Del Gaizo was a bigwig in Mussolini’s Fascist govern- Italian-American market. In 1930, when the United States ment and the official head of the Italian Corporate State, a government placed a 50 percent tariff on tomatoes imported bureaucratic division that took control of industry under from Italy, sales plummeted. American packers seized the Mussolini’s plan for autarky, or complete independence opportunity to grow tomatoes in California, thereby under- from foreign trade. Although he held this position long cutting Italian manufacturers and importers and eventually before the outbreak of World War ii and before Fascism expanding sales to mainstream Americans by means of became so sinister, not a single biographer mentions that aggressive advertising campaigns. Tillie’s interest in tomatoes the funding for Tillie’s California factory originally came was a last-ditch business opportunity in an erratic economy, from Italian investors. Nor do any acknowledge that Del an attempt to climb out of the bankruptcy she had declared Gaizo, Santarsiero & Co. had already been operating in the in 1932, when she claimed liabilities from stock transactions United States for some time. Over a decade before Tillie worth $57,716 and no assets. In other words, she had gone and Florindo’s fabled meeting the company was listed as bust—a fact left out of her feel-good biographies. having a New York branch office, headed by none other Tillie’s innovative idea was to grow the “pomodoro” than Florindo.13 So it seems unlikely that Tillie would have tomato, which we now call the Roma—the San Marzano had to travel all the way to Naples to meet him, but that is type favored in Italy for making sauce. Late in life Tillie how she chose to recount her story in her autobiography. made a point of correcting interviewers, pointing out that Whatever the case, Tillie convinced the Italians to take pomodoro is merely the Italian word for tomato and not a a bet on a tomato cannery in California, where she would different variety, but company records indicate that they take control. She said she came back to the u.s. with ten called it a “pomodoro.”10 Her hunch that Italian Americans thousand dollars to launch the company: “I started with and, later, all Americans would come to prefer this tomato four two pound bags of seeds, and we lost $1,104 the first variety for sauce, and that tomato sauce would become year.”14 But in fact Tillie was not entirely on her own in thoroughly American in the process, proved correct. California. Flotill was founded in 1935 as a subsidiary of Although experts at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Del Gaizo, with headquarters in New York; it was not told Tillie that there was no way to grow pomodoros in the Tillie’s own company. Florindo served as president, Tillie United States, she persevered and later claimed to have as secretary-treasurer, and a team of Italians was brought done the necessary research on soil and climate late at to the California cannery to install and operate the night in the New York Public Library.11 But there was only machinery.15 Flotill tomatoes were sold under the brand one way to be sure about the tomatoes: to save up money name “Flotta,” with a label depicting armed battleships by living on crackers and jam and five-cent fries at the and text in Italian, clearly marketed to Italian Americans. Automat so she could go to Italy to see for herself. Tillie’s There are wildly conflicting stories about Tillie’s first biographers portray her as wide-eyed and eager to learn and years in business. She was fond of telling a story about how imply that she booked passage without having thought the the steam boiler broke down as they were about to start can- trip through. But it is likely that she had set up interviews ning: “I know locomotives make steam so I called up the through connections from her husband’s grocery business, railroad and asked how much they would charge me to bor- 2010 SPRING including a visit to Italy’s largest canning operation, Del row one of their steam engines.